Overview
Jessica Ratcliff works on the history of science and technology. Her research aims to improve our understanding of the political, economic and cultural aspects of scientific and technological change. She specializes in Britain and its former empire from the 17th through the 19th centuries.
Professor Ratcliff’s most recent book, Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain’s Second Scientific Revolution, is now open access! Full downloads, individual chapters and more are available on the book's website at Cambridge University Press. Monopolizing Knowledge has been reviewed in journals such as Nature, the British Journal for the History of Science, the Journal of the History of Collecting, and Cultural and Social History.
Professor Ratcliff is also the author of The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016 [2008]), (see the book’s website here) which examines the technology, culture and politics of scientific expeditions and argues for the critical role of the British Admiralty in the growth of science in late-Victorian Britain.
Professor Ratcliff is also interested in finding new ways for history workers to engage with and influence current trajectories of IT development (generative AI, gaming and museum/archive digitization), as well as in evaluating how these developments are reshaping society's relationship to the past.
Before joining Cornell, Professor Ratcliff was an Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and, before that, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a programmer during the first internet boom. Her research has been supported by the University of Sydney, the Huntington Library, the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, the National Maritime Museum London, the Singapore Ministry of Education, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ.
For further information on Professor Ratcliff’s writing, teaching and research, please see the CV listed here.
Publications
Books
Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain’s Second Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016 [2008])
Forthcoming / in progress
"Artificial Histories: From Empires and Museums to Big Tech and AI" (essay draft)
"The Geography of Membership at the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1825-1925" (essay draft)
"Colonial Science and Frontier Capitalism in Early Colonial Singapore" (essay draft)
“Colonial Political Economies of Information: The East India Company and the Growth of Science in Britain” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Information" (forthcoming)
“Accounting for Empire: Statistics, Slide Rules and Imperial Self-Knowledge” in Scientific Instruments as Cultural Artifacts (Yale University Press) (under review)
Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters
“Hand-in-Hand with the Survey: Surveying and the Accumulation of Knowledge Capital at India House during the Napoleonic Wars.” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 73 (2) (May 2019)
“Travancore’s Magnetic Crusade: Geomagnetism and the Geography of Scientific Production in a Princely State.” British Journal for the History of Science (June 2016)
“The Great Data Divergence: Global History of Science within Global Economic History” in Global Scientific Practice during the Age of Revolutions (Dan Rood and Patrick Manning, eds., University of Pittsburgh Press) (2016)
“The East India Company, the Company’s Museum, and the Political Economy of Natural History in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Isis 107(3) (2016)
“’Art to Cheat the Common-Weale’: Inventors, Projectors and Patentees in English Satire, c. 1630-80.” Technology and Culture 53(2) (2012)
“Models, Metaphors, and the Transit of Venus in Victorian Britain” Special issue: “The astronomical event of the century? Social history of the transits of Venus, 1874-1882.” Cahiers François Viète 11—12 (2007)
“Samuel Morland and his Calculating Machines c. 1666: The Early Career of a Courtier-Inventor in Restoration London.” British Journal for the History of Science 40(2) (2007)
In the news
- How Margaret Rossiter uncovered the hidden women of science
- Rossiter honored for 'writing women back into the history of science'
Courses - Spring 2026
- BSOC 3011 : Life Sciences and Society
- BSOC 4634 : Curating the British Empire
- STS 3011 : Life Sciences and Society
- STS 4634 : Curating the British Empire
- STS 6634 : Curating the British Empire
- STS 6991 : Graduate Independent Study